Follow:

Share:

Opinion: journalist and critic Mimi Zeiger argues that trying to rewrite design history with all-female shows like MoMA's Designing Modern Women does nothing to "shake up the dominant masculine ethos" that still plagues the industry.

How many women? That's the question I routinely ask when faced with a lineup of panelists, a competition jury, an exhibition checklist, or a table of contents. Then I will count, picking out female names and remembering which offices are partnerships.

In the autumn of 2012, Women in Architecture, a group founded by Nina Freedman and Lori Brown, surveyed 73 architecture school public lecture series and found that a shocking 62 percent had either no women or one woman invited as a public lecturer. The following spring their data revealed that one third of schools failed to invite women.

My own statistic comes from the Sci-Fi issue of Clog, a journal rapidly gaining attention and one that speaks to and for an emerging generation of architects. Of the 76 contributors listed in the back of the most recent issue, 11 are women. What would Ursula K. Le Guin say? The author's works routinely tackle gender and race through speculative fiction and her place in the male-dominated genre was hard earned.

Citing statistics doesn't get us any closer to rectifying the inequity

Eleven out of 76 calculates out to 14.4 percent, not too far off from the roughly 17 percent of licensed female architects in the United States or 21 percent in the UK, but nowhere near the figures that suggest near parity between the sexes in school.

We know these numbers well. In fact, we know these grim numbers so well that they've reached a point of abstraction, a slice of pie on a chart. But let's reconfigure the statistics into a scenario: a panel discussion — a programme that happens every day within design culture. I see water bottles lined up, microphones on alert and a screen ready to accept PowerPoint slides.

Enter the panelists: four men and one woman. That's 20 percent.

It would seem that the long fight for gender equality in architecture and design, including the recent and painfully failed attempt to convince the Pritzker jury to rectify a past oversight, has succeeded in reproducing in culture at large the very unevenness found within the profession. This kind of tokenism encourages the kind of go-big or go-home exceptionalism epitomised by Zaha Hadid (I once had a mainstream magazine editor ask me to write a story on why Hadid is the Lady Gaga of architecture) and it also forces, by singular presence, any one female designer to speak for all. As such, Denise Scott Brown is a mouthpiece for a movement outside herself, in addition to a partner of Robert Venturi, a designer and a theorist.

Is grouping women together really a corrective or does it reinforce stereotypes?

Citing statistics doesn't get us any closer to rectifying the inequity. Numbers overshadow what female architects and designers, and what all architects and designers, offer: willingness for discourse, insight into a body of work, ideas for debate.

It might seem that the optimum flip side of the "twenty percent scenario" is an all-gal event or exhibition. But is grouping women together really a corrective or does it reinforce existing stereotypes and marginalisation?

The MoMA show, curated by Juliet Kinchin with assistant Luke Baker, sets out to rewrite twentieth-century design history. In this new narrative women are "...muses of modernity and shapers of new ways of living, and as designers, patrons, performers and educators". Their creativity gives the hard edges of modernism a softer touch and the cannon expands to embrace Aino Aalto, Charlotte Perriand and Margaret McDonald with their male counterparts Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Yet even as MoMA's cannon loosens, the collection still represents these designers within the domestic sphere: the Frankfurt Kitchen, the kitchen from the Unité d'Habitation, cookware, children's toys and textiles.

What is at work is something far more societally insidious than deliberately sexist. Exhibitions and events that market themselves around "women in design" or something equally banal, although well meaning in their curatorial ambition, fail precisely because they present a thematic that unifies based on gender not on ideas. They classify and control the conversation, narrowing it until chromosomes, XX or XY, define the discourse. As a result, these events risk operating outside dominant design culture and inadvertently excuse men from participating.

Cultural programming needs to reflect the aspirations of our discipline, not mirror the inequality

The strongest part of Designing Modern Women is a section entitled Punk to Postmodernism: 1970-1990. The wall text here reads: "By the 1970s, the legacy of modernism was being questioned by new designers who rejected its dominantly masculine ethos and ideal of collective progress toward a singular goal." More than four decades later, while the discipline has progressed, fostering a multitude of end goals, the fight to shake up the dominant masculine ethos continues.

Recently I was struck by a Guardian interview with author Eleanor Catton, her novel The Luminaries having just won the The Man Booker Prize 2013 for fiction. In the article she parses how differently men and women are treated by the press and by the public. Her comments are applicable as much to architecture and design as to literature. "I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel. In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are - about luck and identity and how the idea struck them," she says. "The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime."

Catton's last observation resonates without statistics. To sustain women for a lifetime in architecture and design, we need to place ideas, not gender, front and centre. This means truly diverse - gender, race, sexuality - juries, panels, lecture series and exhibitions. It means digging deeper for themes, topics and platforms that support all participants. While we are still a long way off from being post-gender, our cultural programming needs to reflect the aspirations of, not mirror the inequality, within the discipline.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.

Comments

Selecting women for the sake of selecting women is worse than not selecting women at all.

Duane Robot

Yes, but "it means digging deeper for themes, topics and platforms that support all participants."

i.e - we don't have to select (x) for the "sake of selecting" them if we stop self-censoring to focus on only the topics dominated in the discourse by the white, western male and the affluent.

EC

This is not what she is suggesting at all. The lack of women being selected is not because qualified women do not exist. Women should not be chosen because they are women, but because they have legitimate ideas. You seem to have missed the point of the whole article. Women are consistently looked over because they are women. She is simply suggesting that this needs to stop.

Concerned Citizen

On the surface it appears that you are right. But in the end, that is still the goal. I find that if women are overlooked it is because they don't offer the expertise required. How many women have deep experience in heavy industrial projects with high hazard materials, for example?

Conern or discrimnation?

Excuse me? Are you on the same planet as I am? I am an engineer and an architect who happens to be a woman, along with 51% of the students who graduating from my engineering university. I have years of experience along with two full degrees. I have done and have been trained to work on any number of heavy industrial projects. As has my colleague and CEO who is an industrial ecologist whom also happens to be a woman.

Highly qualified women are out there is large number because one of the places where we can now freely engage in society is the university (though women are still grossly under-represented in top positions in the staff there).

But seriously why do you assume I/we are not qualified? Because we are not represented in juries or invited to speak? Why do you make the assumption that it is because women possess inferior expertise? What are you basing your assumptions on?

Concerned Citizen

I just asked the question. Answer the question instead of attacking me. And "large number" is not an answer.

BriH

Wow! I consider myself reasonably intelligent, but I failed to understand any of this. Can anyone enlighten me?

Melissa J. Frost

YES.

James Clark

One of the ideas that always irritates me about women who design is this great assumption that they make things "softer."

It may be something that some women choose to do, choose to embrace, but it's hardly general. I don't think there's anything particularly soft about designing and running a successful building project, nor designing the cruel footwear that fashion has put in the marketplace.

Perhaps when we can embrace the ruggedly uncompromising approach of people like Germaine Greer, the willfully forward looking design of Zaha Hadid and the intellectual rigour of an author like Denise Scott Brown in the same way as their male counterparts, the wider issues of gender will suddenly seem easier to address.

In any case, I agree that talent is what these people should be judged on, their ideas critiqued just as thoroughly on their own merits and the discussion should move away from pigeon-holing to a broader inclusion in the debate.

Mario

I was made to hunt and built shelters.

Jule Mare Rozite

"Exhibitions and events that market themselves around "women in design" or something equally banal, although well meaning in their curatorial ambition, fail precisely because they present a thematic that unifies based on gender not on ideas.

They classify and control the conversation, narrowing it until chromosomes, XX or XY, define the discourse. As a result, these events risk operating outside dominant design culture and inadvertently excuse men from participating."

You could argue (and I believe) that that is the case now but in reverse - with women excused from all-male panels/exhibitions/boardrooms purportedly "by coincidence" or due to them being based on "ideas" or "talent". I believe exhibitions/concerts/festivals with all women are necessary and shouldn't be belittled or criticised for not including men when women regularly aren't included.

Thaisa Way

Thank you for this well written critique, however, I would push a bit farther. As another implied - if we look to women's work for ideas, deep philosophies, concepts, we can significantly and seriously expand the canon. If we just look to merely "include" or "feature" someone with cleavage, then we have done nothing. Thus I believe it is critical to look at design through gender, race, class, etc. not as a means to essentialise but as a means to identify alternative modes of thinking, practicing, and acting. That however, is rarely pursued in exhibits that feature women or minorities.

SCAQTony

Designers and architects generally don't sign their work. When a user picks up their iPod they do not see the name Jonathan Ive engraved in the corner. When driving in Tokyo or San Francisco past a concrete house with a finish as smooth as a baby's bottom, one does not see the name Tadao Ando, Architect on a shingle or eve.

Ladies, just do good work. Who gives a s*** if you are given an accolade or appointed to a panel? Most people never heard of Frank Gehry till his stuff started "laser beaming" people. Perhaps if you stop caring you just might end designing an Olympic Aquatics centre! (Read as Zaha Hadid who gets plenty of accolades and plenty of press.)

Concerned Citizen

So, a perceived wrong in your view is just fine if it favours you?

Jack

This topic has become ridiculous. It's like it is almost fashionable to be a feminist now! This whole debate and "political" movement is so ironic. Women want equal rights, but set up companies that aim to help WOMEN, and only women. They search through all the balls**t to find issues relating to unprofessionalism towards women. When there is a panel of judges for a competition, why is it important to "count the number of women" on the panel? The problem isn't women being overlooked, it's feminists being so uptight and smug about the fact they think they "have one over" on the industry. Work hard and be professional, you'll get a job.

Mirror

Why do you need to make sweeping statements like that? Which just don't hold to be true? What makes you so angry? Isn't okay to address inequality and representation? To discuss it? To ask for respect for ideas beyond gender. To point out that gender does stand in the way in terms of your opportunities if you happen to be born female.

What should people 'shut up'? What investment do you have in dismissing and ignoring oppression and discrimination? Why do you need to insult, undermine and condescend? How does that contribute to how you construct your own identity? Please engage in facts not the dissemination of misinformation. Try once to breath and look at what the issues are before you slam the door loudly and rudely.